Exodus 6 - 40

Ever slowly, I'm progressing through the reading of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelations. Exodus has been some slow, depressing reading, but here are my thoughts on it:

• Puppet Pharaoh: Repeatedly, Exodus explicitly says that God is responsible for the hardening of Pharaoh's heart (Exodus 7:3, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10). In Exodus 11:9, God says "Pharaoh will not listen to you, in order that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt."  God isn't just professing that Pharaoh is a jerk and will harden his own heart ... it's very clear that God is the cause of the hardening. This really paints God, not Pharaoh, as the bad guy in this tale. After every single plague, practically, it seems as if Pharaoh is about to relent ... and then his "heart hardens" or he "hardens his heart" ... but if God is really the reason why Pharaoh's heart hardens, then it's really God's fault that the Israelites aren't freed earlier, and it appears to be for the sake of showing off his "wonders." Furthermore, this brings up issues of free will ... rarely do you ever hear about God directly intervening in people's emotional states, but this seems to be a pretty clear cut case of this. Pharaoh is shown as little more than God's puppet in all of this. (This reminds me of the arguments that Judas' betrayal is necessary for the salvation in the New Testament, so Judas is, in an odd way, performing God's work.)
• The mystery of the resurrected livestock: In Exodus 9, "all the livestock of the Egyptians died" (The Fifth Plague), but then in Exodus 11 (The Tenth Plague) the firstborn all die, including "all the firstborn of the livestock." But the livestock all died already, so how are the firstborn dying again? This brings up another point - one of timing. I can't tell from my read of this what sort of timeframe the plagues are taking place over. The impression is a fairly rapid-fire series of plagues, but I suppose it is feasible that these plagues are spread out over a period of years (although that's certainly less impressive than the more common depictions). Exodus 7:7 says that Moses is 80 and Aaron 83 when they first approach Pharaoh, but I'm not seeing a later age stated that would give us a timeframe. (If I'm just missing it, please let me know where it is.)
• The firstborn belong to God: in Exodus 13:12, there is an intriguing command - "you shall set apart to the Lord all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your livestock that are males shall be the Lord's. But every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a sheep; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. Every firstborn male among your children shall you redeem." In other words, you're supposed to sacrifice a sheep to redeem the firstborn male children. I wonder if anyone (Jewish or Christian) still follows this today.
• The Red Sea or Sea of Reeds: the Bible account of the crossing of the Red Sea (or, as a footnote indicates, possibly the "Sea of Reeds") is always thrilling. I've heard the Sea of Reeds reference to try to tone down this passage, as if maybe God guided Moses through a marsh or something, but the account is pretty specific that this is dramatic. The water forms walls on the sides of the Israelites and collapses back upon the Egyptians, who are "tossed ... into the sea." There's not really any doubt that the passage is attempting to describe a spectacular miracle ... of course, it may be that this is an exaggeration of the actual events being described, and that the "Sea of Reeds" is the only remnant of the older version of the tale.
• Jethro's managerial advice: I love Exodus 18, where Moses' father-in-law basically tells him that he's working too hard and needs to learn how to delegate before he burns himself out. Religious leaders should really devote a lot more time to making it clear that there's good, practical advice like this available in the Bible. 
• The Real Ten Commandments: Well, the traditional Ten Commandments show up in Exodus 20, but they aren't actually called "The Ten Commandments." I did some investigation, and it looks like the name "the Ten Commandments" is actually mentioned in the Bible only later on (Exodus 34:10-28), where Moses makes new tablets after the Golden Calf incident, but that's a slightly different set of commandments. So every time some sanctimonious person wants to put the ten commandments on display in a public location, a smart-ass can try to make sure they're actually wanting to display the right ones. The actual ten commandments are the following, and are more worship-focused than the traditional Ten Commandment list, which are mostly moral laws:
  
  1. Have/worship no other gods.
  2. Don't make covenants with the people you encounter in the other lands (this is really a refinement of the "no other gods" one, because these other people will lead the Isrealites astray)
  3. Don't cast idols
  4. Keep the festival of unleavened bread (Passover)
  5. The first out of the womb belongs to God. Clean animals should be sacrificed, but unclean animals should be redeemed by the sacrifice of a clean animal. Human firstborn males should also be redeemed through the sacrifice of a clean animal.
  6. No one should appear before God empty-handed.
  7. Keep the sabbath, and observe three festivals per year: "the festival of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the festival of ingathering at the turn of the year. Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God, the God of Israel."
  8. Do not offer the blood of sacrifices with leaven, and don't leave the Passover sacrifice out overnight.
  9. The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord
  10. You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk
• Laws and more laws: Yikes, this is a tedious section of the book, and I have the feeling it's going to keep going for several books. How to build an altar, a temple, the ark of the covenant. Can't wait until I'm through "the books of the law." 
• Hatin' on witches: Exodus 22:18 says "You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live." ... but male sorcerers are okay? Odd.
• Two tablets: In Exodus 31: 18, Moses is given two tablets which include "the covenant" ... but the details of this covenant took over 10 pages to describe in the Bible. God must have some crazy economical shorthand system to fit all of this on the tablets.
• The Golden Calf: I knew that Moses' brother Aaron was part of the Golden Calf story, but I didn't realize that it was actually his idea! I'd always assumed that some putzes in the crowd got this going, and Aaron just kind of got dragged along with it, but it turns out that he was the ringleader in gathering the gold and casting the idol. In fact, when Moses comes down to straighten things out, Aaron himself places the blame on everyone else. What a wanker!
• The Wrath of God: God gets mad over the Golden Calf incident, but Moses is able to talk Him down. This is a common event with the Old Testament God, and God seems to respect those who can talk sense into Him when He gets out of control. (This is actually part of what I most love about my own wife, so I can relate to this, although I rarely declare that "my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them" ... although sometimes I am close." - Exodus 32:10) "And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people." (Exodus 32:14) Still, despite Moses apparently convincing Him not to just "consume them" and then ordering the execution of 3,000 of the Israelites, God still feels the need that "Whoever has sinned against me I will blog out of my book" (Exodus 32:33) and he sends a plague (Exodus 32:35). Guess he changed his mind again.
• The Wrath of Moses: In Exodus 32:20, after breaking the tablets, Moses "took the [golden] calf they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Isrealites drink it." Then he begins berating Aaron and others, finally getting the Levites to kill 3,000 of the Isrealites, before he can get things under control. I'm assuming this isn't chronological, since I presume he'd want to get his people under control before he spends the day grinding the calf into powder and making people drink it (which, presumably, takes a fair amount of time).
• Repetition again: We are re-introduced to Bezalel and Oholiab, who were introduced in Exodus 31 and then introduced again in Exodus 35. It's hard to see how anyone can read Exodus and believe that  it is not a collection of stories that got edited together. There's no way that a single person wrote this book, unless they had severe ADD and couldn't keep track of what they wrote the day before. Now, I suppose that in fairness, in Exodus 31 God is telling Moses about Bezalel and Oholiab, but in Exodus 35 Moses is telling the Israelites about them ... but it's basically the exact same passage, but told in first person and then in second person. (Bezalel & Oholiab are awesome designers/carpenters, who are placed in charge of building the Tabernacle that God earlier described. They got their crazy mad building skills from God himself, as we are told both times.) Then, after having the lengthy instructions for the Tabernacle from God, we're given the description of its actual building ... which, since they're following the exact steps outlined by God just a few chapters ago, is again repetition.

And that, my friends, is my reading of Exodus ... on to Leviticus.

Exodus 1 - 5:

On with my reading of the Bible, and now I'm into the beginning of Exodus. Not a lot to say here, although the story is much more mundane compared to most of Genesis. My major experience with Exodus until now has been the DreamWorks animated film Prince of Egypt, a fine film but, it turns out, not entirely biblically accurate:

• Unlike Prince of Egypt, Moses' murder of an Egyptian is entirely premeditated in the Bible. "[Moses] saw an Egyptian beaing a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand." (Exodus 2:11-12)
• After Moses flees Egypt he settles in the land of Midian, where he meets a priest of Midian with 7 daughters, one of whom (Zipporah) he marries. However, when we're introduced to the priest of Midian his name is Reuel (Exodus 2:18) but shortly thereafter he is referred to as Jethro (Exodus 3:1).
• When encountering the burning bush, Moses continually tries to get out of his mandate to go back and bring the Israelites out of bondage. He's taught some magic tricks to prove to the Israelites that he's for real - he can turn a stick into a snake and back into a stick (this was in Prince of Egypt) and he can turn his hand leperous and non-leperous at will (this was not).
• One of his most interesting protests is the declaration that he's not a good speaker, at which point God says that he'll let his brother, Aaron, speak for him. I've actually heard about Moses not being a good speaker, but I heard that he was a stutterer, is probably from his statement that "I am slow of speech and slow of tongue."
• Exodus 5 ends with things not going well, and the Israelites are not pleased with Moses and Aaron. After asking for time in the wilderness to worship their God, Pharoah makes things even harder on them, and the Israelites blame Moses for it - "The Lord look upon you and judge! You have brought us into bad odor with Pharaoh and his officials, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us." (Exodus 5: 21). This "don't rock the boat, because you're making things worse" mentality reminds me a bit of people who protested against slavery or against early activities in the civil rights movement. This must have been the sort of mentality that Martin Luther King Jr. had in mind when he railed against white moderate ministers who believed in the cause of equality but didn't act on it:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

The End of the Beginning (Genesis 14 - 50):

Over the last month, I've gotten through Genesis which, while a bit of a feat, isn't nearly as far as I'd like to go. I've also read three other books, though, so it's not like I've been completely falling off the wagon. Anyway, on to my thoughts on the Genesis:

• So in Chapter 16, we get the situation where Sarah, unable to bear Abraham (still called Abram at this point) an heir, has him sleep with her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, who bears him Ishmael. Hagar conceives, gets haughty, and begins treating Sarah with contempt. No domestic tranquility comes from this surrogate mother situation.
• Sodom & Gomorrah - a lot of craziness in these sections of the Bible (Genesis 18 & 19). First, Angels show up to Abraham to tell him they're going to destroy the evil towns, but Abraham puts forward a good argument in favor of saving the town if there are virtuous people in it. If God can find 10 virtuous people living there, he'll save the towns.
• The angels then show up at Lot's house and the Sodomite townspeople begin banging on the door, wanting to gang rape them. Instead, Lot offers his two daughters (virgins, but they're engaged ... and given what transpires after they escape, I'm wagering they haven't been saving themselves).
• During the escape from Sodom, we're shown once again what a useless putz Lot really is. No one listens to him. He goes to his prospective sons-in-law, telling them to leave the city, and they ignore him. Angels are telling him that the town is being destroyed, and he dallies so long that they finally have to drag him, his daughters, and his wife out of the town. A man of action he is not.
• Once out of town, and his wife having turned to salt (because she looked back at the destruction when told not to), Lot hides in caves with his two daughters ... and we receive an abject lesson in why alcohol is bad. (Worse, even, than Noah passing out naked.) Noah's two daughters proceed to get him drunk, then have sex with him and conceive children ... who will, incidentally, go on to be ancestors to the Moabites and Ammonites, other tribes of the region. It would be like if someone from Indiana told a story of how Kentuckians were all inbred ... oh, wait, they do tell those stories.
• In Chapter 20, once again, Abraham is traveling around and tells Sarah to pretend to be his sister. I understood it back in Chapter 12, but for it to happen again is a bit odd. If this chapter is placed chronologically, Sarah is very old - she's already given up on having children, and was quite old at that point, apparently. Again, though, she's snagged by a nearby ruler - King Abimelech of Gerar. Now, while I've seen some attractive older women in my time, I can't imagine a king snatching up elder matrons right and left. Still, according to Abraham, their standard operating procedure is apparently to pose as brother/sister when traveling, because Abraham is continually worried that someone will kill him for Sarah if they knew they were married. I suppose it's much better to just let various rulers yank her into the royal harem for a few days. (In fairness, it never actually says, or implies, that either Pharoah in Ch 12 nor Abimelech in Ch 20 did anything inappropriate with Sarah ... but if this is a society where Abraham has a serious concern of being killed for his wife, I can't imagine that she's particularly safe herself.)
• Abraham is commanded to sacrifice Isaac in Chapter 22. He doesn't do it, of course, but ... man. I think if God commanded me to sacrifice my son, I'd have to begin turning to pagan gods. Sorry, but that's just how I see things.
• Isaac marries Rebekah, and they have the sons Jacob & Esau. Jacob is cunning and Esau is a bit of a dolt. Jacob convinces Esau to sell his birthright to him for some stew, and then tricks Isaac into giving his dying blessing to him instead of the older Esau.
• In Chapter 25, Isaac goes to Gerar and this time, too, goes through this brother/sister ruse. Again, King Abimelech of Gerar (possibly the son of the former or the same guy - it's unclear, although if Abimelech is still king when Isaac comes by, then he was likely a fairly young man when he decided to yank the older Sarah into his household. Maybe he had a thing for cougars.) Abimelech finds out the truth and chastizes Isaac, indicating that someone could have laid with Rebekah thinking she was single and "brought guilt upon us." Overall, this brother/sister plan seems to have played itself out and I think this is the last time we see it in the Bible.
• Jacob has some serious relationship troubles ... talk about Big Love. When he asks permission to marry Rachel, her father, Laban, convinces him to stay and work for him for 7 years. He then sends Leah in to the marital tent at night, and Jacob does his husbandly duty ... only to realize the next morning that he married the wrong sister. When he confronts Laban, he is lamely told that the firstborn (Leah) had to get married off first. (That would have been nice to know when they entered this arrangement 7 years earlier - he would have had 7 years to have found a guy for Leah, and Shakespeare might have set Taming of the Shrew in the Biblical era.) Since Jacob wants to marry Rachel, he agrees to 7 more years of servitude. After a week with Leah, he marries Rachel as well.
• Rachel is loved, but barren. Leah is unloved, but fertile. Very fertile, in fact. She in fact has 4 sons for Jacob (Reuben, Simeon, Levi, & Judah), which implies that she wasn't that "unloved" by Jacob and he clearly wasn't particularly put out by having been tricked into marrying her. Rachel, wanting children too, tells him to marry her maid, Bilhah, who bears two more sons (Dan & Naphtali). Not to be outdone, Leah has him marry her maid, Zilpah, who bore Gad & Asher.
• Rachel wants some of Reuben's mandrakes, so she strikes a deal with Leah that she can sleep with Jacob again in exchange for them. Leah cashes in her IOU and conceives Issachar. Then later (through means not particularly described) she has Zebulun. And finally, a daughter, Dinah. Again, Jacob doesn't seem particularly upset about being married to Leah.
• Finally, God "opens Rachel's womb" and she conceives Joseph. She later has another son, Benjamin.
• In Genesis 32, we get the famous "Jacob wrestles with an angel" passage ... and I've got to say that I'm distinctly underwhelmed. First of all, there's nothing overtly supernatural in the passage at all. Here is what it says "Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak." The man wants released at daybreak, but Jacob won't let him go until he gets a blessing. The man blesses him and gives him the name Israel. Jacob says, "Please tell me your name" and the man replies "Why is it that you ask my name?" So clearly the artistic renditions of this are way off, because he is described throughout the passage as a "man" and not an "angel." No wings or anything. In fact, it probably isn't even an angel, because Jacob says "I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." So he didn't wrestle an angel, but according ot the passage wrestled God himself (to a standstill, apparently, although I think one can assume that God was probably holding back).
• The rape of Dinah - this is just weird. It's described well by David Plotz in Good Book, because it's the passage that inspires his reading of the entire Old Testament. I have to agree with his analysis - tricking people into converting to your religion just so you can slay them when they're weak from circumcision seems a bit like a dirty trick. I normally don't defend rapists, but in this odd case the rapist appears to have fallen in love with Dinah, begged for her hand in marriage, and supplicated himself to convert to her family's religion ... and appears to have done so with sincerity.
• Now we get to the story of Joseph (whose coat is not many colored, but "a long robe with sleeves," according to my translation). I know the story of his brothers selling him off to slavery, but what I didn't know is that they originally wanted to kill him, but Reuben talked them out of it. Instead, they dropped him in a pit in the wilderness. Reuben had the plan of coming back later to rescue him. Unfortunately, once the brothers trap him in the pit, they decide to sell him into slavery ... and do so before Reuben can rescue him.
• Joseph ends up in Egypt, where he (after a convoluted series of events) becomes Pharoah's lead advisor, essentially in charge of the entire food supply for the nation. His brothers come during famine for help, and he sets up a situation to see if they've changed ... and they succeed. Ultimately, he forgives his brothers, but only after having seen that they have redeemed themselves by choosing right actions. A good message, and a great one on which to end Genesis.

My Good Book Experience - Genesis 1-13:

I finally started reading the Bible, planning to go from the beginning to the end, both Old and New Testaments. I've been wanting to do this for a while and became even more motivated through my recent readings, most notably Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible by David Plotz. Also, going to church on a regular basis with Amber, and having one child with another on the way, I've decided it's time to actually read this book and figure out what I think about what it has to say, as opposed to just whipping out some interesting tidbits here and there from my readings about the Bible.

So here I am, 13 chapters into Genesis. The version I'm using is The Green Bible, a version of the New Revised Standard Version that has verses related to God's law about how to deal with creation (i.e. eco-verses) in a green typeface. It also comes with a number of essays in the beginning by various religious thinkers about Creation Theology (i.e. eco-Christianity). (By complete coincidence - or possibly divine providence - The Green Bible and Good Book are being sold together for an additional 5% off as a "Best Value" deal on Amazon.com.)

Anyway, on to the reading ... which was not nearly so tedious as one might expect. It flows relatively easily so far. While the verses of lineages may not be particularly thrilling reading, the also go quickly. I read a section (I'm trying for about 5 pages or so a day), and Amber is reading the same sections. We will then discuss them prior to me posting a blog about it, so this is a mesh of our mutual insights and observations. Here are my comments and notes so far, based on the first 13 chapters of Genesis:

1. There are two creation stories, which I already knew. In the first (Genesis 1), the creation of man and woman appears to take place at the same time. In the second (Genesis 2), the more elaborate story of Eve being created from Adam's rib is told.
2. God references himself in plural form a couple of times - "Let us make humankind in our image" (Genesis 1:24) and "the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 2:22). Polytheism or a foreshadowing of the Holy Trinity? (Or both?)
3. Snakes used to have legs! God made them lose their legs because the serpent tempted mankind into eating the fruit (also, no indication it was necessarily an apple). Also, no indication that this was Satan or a demon or anything - just a regular snake.
4. As always, I'm curious about God's behavior when looking for Adam and Eve. Is he pretending that he can't see them, like I play hide and seek with my son? Is he giving them the chance to confess? Or does he genuinely not realize that they've already eaten the fruit? I'm left with two alternatives - either God's not really omniscient, or God chooses to fake us out at times, making any statements of his a bit untrustworthy.
5. Cain negotiates his punishment for killing his brother Abel. (Genesis 4:13-15) Initially, God punishes Cain with banishment and with a curse that he'll be unable to farm, making him a fugitive and wanderer, to which Cain replies, "My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today, you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me." to which God replies "Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance" and then God places a mark on Cain "so that no one who came upon him would kill him." This reads to me like Cain actually points out something which God hadn't initially thought of, and God quickly comes up with a way around the problem. David Plotz makes the point that God frequently seems to get talked out of rash action by a good argument. That's something I can certainly respect ... actually, I respect it a bit more than I respect the idea a perfect, infallible, supreme, all-knowing deity.
6. I knew that Cain miraculously found a wife after being banished, but I didn't realize that there were details on his lineage (Genesis 4:17-24). Cain founds Enoch, a city named after his son, Enoch. Enoch had a son Irad, who had a son Mehujael, who had a son Methushael, who had a son Lamech, who had sons Jabal & Jubal. Another wife had Tubal-cain and his sister Naamah. Lamech, apparently, was a bit of a prick, with the odd proclamation ending the story of Cain's line: "I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold." Not great role models in the Cain family line, although apparently Lamech's kids are ancestors of "those who live in tents and have livestock," "those who play the lyre and pipe," and "made all kinds of bronze and iron tools."
7. Adam's line through his third son, Seth, oddly, ends up with some similarities ... there's another Enoch, this time who has a son Methuselah, who then has a son Lamech. The similarities in names threw me, so I had to go back and make sure there was no way this family could have intermarried back into Cain's line ... which isn't possible, of course, since both lines are traced through fathers to sons. Of course, given the time period, it wasn't like there were a ton of names floating around.
8. Right before the flood, we are introduced to the Nephilim, who "were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown." (Genesis 6:4) and are, from how I read this, the children of angels having mated with human women (Genesis 6:1-2,4). These angels are sometimes viewed as fallen angels, but there's no direct indictment of their behavior within the text itself. It seems to be just a statement of fact. The text abruptly switches to the wickedness of mankind ... but I wonder if the flood wasn't, in part, to get rid of all the Nephilim. Or was God mad at the women for letting the angels sleep with them?
9. In the middle of the Nephilim passage, God declares that humans shall live only 120 years (Genesis 6:3) . Noah, as we will see in some chapters, appears to live 950 years, so has been grandfathered into the over 120 year club.
10. The flood timeline is a bit confusing. There are 40 days, then 150 days, then 40 days again. Here is, I believe, the proper timeline: Flood starts on the 17th day of the second month of Noah's 600th year. Water rises from the earth and falls from the sky for 40 days, then stops, so we're at the start of the fourth month. The waters swelled for 150 days in all, putting it in the middle of the seventh month, when the ark lands on the mountains of Ararat. The mountains are apparently still underwater, though (the bottom of the ark is hung up on them, apparently) until the tenth month, at which time the top of the mountains become exposed. After forty days (early in the eleventh month - although I'm not sure if they had eleven months when this was written, so we might be in the first month of the next year) he lets out a raven, who flies around as the water dries up on the Earth. Then he sends a dove, who can't find a place to set down, so comes back. (Why the raven didn't come back is never explained.) A week later, he sends the dove out again. This time it comes back with an olive leaf. A week later (about the end of the eleventh month), he sends out the dove again, but it doesn't come back. At this point, we're told it's the first day of the first month of Noah's 601st year - so this would kind of mesh if the ancient Hebrew calendar had exactly 11 months. All told, Noah and his family spends an entire year in the ark.
11. God has mood swings. In Genesis 6: 5-7 we are told that God is very angry about "the wickedness of humankind" and "that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually." He declares that "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created ... for I am sorry that I have made them." Then, after the flood, he says (Genesis 8:21-22), after Noah provides him with a burnt offering of the "clean" animals and he is pleased by the smell of the offering, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth." Notice that the situation hasn't changed - human thoughts are still evil. But now God seems okay with it, like it's an endearing personality flaw that he'll put up with. If only Noah had ignited a burnt offering before the Flood, it might have been avoided.
12. Noah plants the first vineyard, gets drunk, then passes out naked. When his grandson stumbles upon him, and tells his sons, he curses the grandson to become their slave, because he saw Noah's nakedness. I have no idea how to interpret this. It's just plain weird.
13. The tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1-9) is much more mundane than I expected. Though it says that humans said "let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens," the tower itself doesn't seem to actually be an attempt to reach divine paradise itself. When God shows up, his complaint isn't even explicitly about their hubris in building the tower. It seems to be almost a complaint about their competence: "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible to them." Then God decides to confuse their language almost just for kicks. It's not really a punishment for anything they've actually done.
14. Once again, God refers to himself in the plural - Genesis 11:7 - "Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there..."
15. More descendants. Among them we've got some who are living a couple of hundred years, even though God specifically set a time limit of 120 years back in Genesis 6:3. At least we're out of the 900s now.